Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  But here we’re talking about literature.

  So the message in the bottle to students marooned on an island which has been nuked by the neutron bomb, which leaves the library intact but which has killed off all TV personnel, scrambled all satellite transmissions of As the World Turns and The Donahue Show, killed the staff of Cinema Six, the movie theater, which still advertises Black Widow, Rambo III, Mannequin, Bedroom Window, Call Girl, and Beast of the Black Lagoon. So there’s nothing left on the island but a library full of books. What to do—after exploring the island?

  I’ll give you the extreme case—and, unfortunately, I didn’t make it up. I think it was Aldous Huxley. I think his character was the last survivor on a devastated earth. He’s left his cave and is wandering through the ruins, picks up a tattered book, which happens to be Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He reads it! With astonishment and delight! Now, honestly, who among us would go to the library on our day off, sign out a copy of The Tempest, take it home, turn off the tube, which is showing the Super Bowl, and read it? Read The Tempest? Would you? Do you think I would? Am I suggesting that reading is a lost art and that the bomb has to fall in order that the few survivors might discover it, for lack of anything better to do? Well, not quite. But something of the sort is going on. Great Books are somewhat inaccessible. So, failing them, it is the task of living writers to do better than Jackie Collins, to be as diverting, if you can’t do as well as Shakespeare or Faulkner.

  Let’s say that the castaways are marooned for years, with no TV and nothing but a big deserted library of a million books. For lack of anything better to do, they read. They read for years. Some books they like very much. Some they can’t stand. But what’s the verdict over the years? Which books are the favorites, and why? Certainly, after ten years, there will be a kind of consensus of what’s bad and what’s good. But will any standards emerge by which the castaways decide which is bad and which is good?

  Here, of course, we get into all sorts of difficulties; that is, when we start talking about what’s good and bad in literature and why, what’s great and what’s mediocre, what’s moral and what’s immoral, what’s trash and what’s enduring.

  For example, a good many of the castaways might find themselves reading Louis L’Amour, dozens, hundreds of Louis L’Amour novels—for months. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Louis L’Amour. He’s a very skilled craftsman at what he does, which is to construct highly entertaining and diverting stories.

  But after ten years a strange thing happens. The Louis L’Amour fan may find that after he’s read all the books he does not go back and reread Louis L’Amour. But he does go back and reread, say, Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn. Why is that?

  Here’s another puzzlement. Let’s say that he or she, as she explores the library, comes on a shelf in the fiction wing labeled “Christian Novels.” What is the reader apt to do, whether he is a Christian or not? Keep moving, of course.

  Why is that? What is the big turnoff about a label like Christian Novel? Let us admit that the reader’s instincts in passing up this shelf are probably quite sound. Because he knows what he’s probably in for. What he’s in for in too many cases are books which set out to be “uplifting,” “edifying,” “moral.” Now, what’s wrong with being uplifting, edifying, moral? Nothing, if the uplift comes from the writer’s art and not from his need to preach. As Flannery O’Connor used to say, show me fifty ladies who want to read uplifting books and what you’ve got is a book club.

  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Dante’s Inferno and O’Connor’s Wise Blood are great Christian books, but not because the authors set out to be uplifting.

  Why is it that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which caused a great scandal when it was published, is a more truly Christian novel than, say, The Big Fisherman, which is about St. Peter and not only was edifying but also made a lot of money?

  And what about pornography? We would all agree that pornography is bad, but on what grounds? There are those who say it isn’t. And, let’s face it, a certain number of the castaways would spend a good deal of time in the dirty-book section of the library. And if we can agree that pornography is bad, does it follow that descriptions of explicit sexual behavior are also bad? And if not, why not?

  In a word, after ten years on the island, does any sort of standard begin to emerge by which the castaways can agree about what’s bad and what’s good?

  Well, first, there will soon be a sort of agreement about pornography, what makes a book pornographic or, at least, different from other books.

  It will soon become obvious to nearly everyone on the island that pornography is different from other writings, that it sets out to do something other books don’t do. If other novels set out to entertain, or tell about how things are, create characters and adventures with which the reader can identify, pornography is doing something quite different. It sets out quite deliberately to stimulate the reader sexually. There is something with which Christians and non-Christians, scientists and English teachers, can agree. It is no great mystery. Pornography, which is a transaction in signs, is not really different from Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell which he has learned “means” the approach of food.

  So, without getting into the vexed question of censorship or even of moral theology, I am content here to say that, whatever pornography is, it is not literature, not even bad literature. It is something else. To put it in semiotic terms, literature has to do with me writing words about something which you read with understanding and the pleasure, I hope, of affirming it. Pornography has to do with my using words as stimuli to elicit certain responses from you. Literature is an “I-you” transaction in which symbols are used to transmit truths of a sort. Pornography is an “I-it” transaction in which you become an “it,” an organism manipulated by stimuli.

  It is not necessary, I’m sure, to tell you who becomes the It in this transaction. It is the woman, of course, all women, who are degraded in their very persons by being used as objects.

  Then, what is allowed? I don’t mean allowed by censors. I mean allowed by the serious writer and the serious reader. What about explicit sex? Explicit violence?—there is also, of course, such a thing as a pornography of violence. The only rule I follow is that anything is allowed that serves the artistic purpose of the novel. The biblical Song of Songs is not pornographic, because the lover’s description of the beloved serves the purpose of the writer,

  But here the writer must be careful and know what he’s doing. Because, if he’s a serious writer, what he is worried about is not using “dirty words” or shocking the reader—after all, Flannery O’Connor used shock as her favorite literary device—no, what he is worried about is distracting the reader from the real purpose of the novel. If I have a certain truth or artistic form to convey in a novel, and if I write a scene which is so explicitly sexual or so explicitly violent that the reader is distracted, either by stimulation, that is, by sexual titillation, or by loathing and disgust, then I have lost him or her and have failed as a novelist.

  This rule, for me, holds true whether we’re speaking of the novel as high art, high comedy, or high entertainment. Thus, it will not do in Huckleberry Finn if Huck goes ashore for raunchy sexual encounters or Rambo-like violence, because such side trips distract from the main theme that works—Huck afloat on the raft on the Mississippi and, therefore, oneself afloat, on the way, on the road, spinning along in a zone of pure possibility, between states so to speak, on the way finally out West, lighting out for the territory, the perfect symbol for a new life of freedom.

  So it is a delicate business, writing novels these days, if one is a serious writer—which, of course, includes being a comic writer—and not out for the skin trade, the Playboy voyeurs of certain bestsellers, which, admittedly, can be lucrative. One is going to lose some readers, overstimulate some, turn off others—like my aunt in Georgia, an old-style Presbyterian, who used to say to me: “Walker, why do you have to use those terrible words? W
hy can’t you write high-minded books like your Uncle Will?”—meaning William Alexander Percy, who was, in fact, more a high-minded writer than I.

  What we’re approaching is a kind of general criterion for telling good books from bad books, what makes good books good and bad books bad. The first rule of thumb, of course, is pleasure. A good book gives the reader pleasure, the sort of deep, abiding pleasure he likes to come back to. If a writer does not give pleasure, he’d better take up another line of work—unless he’s writing textbooks, which are not supposed to give pleasure—but even here, as you know better than I, a really good textbook can be a delight.

  But what is a good writer up to when he’s writing a book that will give the reader pleasure? First of all, he’s telling the truth. Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition, so that one never recognizes oneself, the deepest part of oneself, in a bad book. And even when a bad book gives its own sort of pleasure, either a pastime of diversion and adventurism, or the titillation of voyeurism, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, like a hangover from bad Bourbon.

  The truth of the novelist is a special kind of truth. What kind of truth? It is a truth more like good carpentry than like good reporting. Or, as the Scholastics used to say, art is a virtue of the practical intellect. It is in the sphere of making, not reasoning, not reporting. A good novel is like a good table. The parts have to fit; it has to work, that is, sit foursquare and at the right level. And it has to please. Its truth lies in the way it looks, feels, hefts—the touch and the grain of the thing. Its morality follows from the form and the excellence of the thing. That is to say, its morality comes from within, follows naturally from its making and is not imposed from without. It does not preach.

  Let me say a final word about the relationship between the art of the novel and Christianity, the Catholic faith in particular, at least as I see it. It might appear from what I have said—that art is in the sphere of making something—that novel-writing is pure craftsmanship and has nothing to do with religion. Indeed, mightn’t Christianity even be a handicap to the writer, considering the number of bad so-called Christian novels that have been written? It can be argued that the most beautiful vases in the world were made by Greek pagans and Japanese Buddhists.

  Here I can only give my own conviction. It is that there is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos, Catholicism in particular. It is no accident, I think, that the novel is a creature of the Christian West and is virtually nonexistent in the Buddhist, Taoist, and Brahmin East, to say nothing of Marxist countries.

  It is the narrativity and commonplaceness of the novel which is unique. Something is happening in ordinary time to ordinary people, not to epic heroes in mythic time.

  It is no coincidence that in the very part of the world where novels have been written and read, the presiding ethos, the central overriding belief, is that the salient truth of life is not the teaching of a great philosopher or the enlightenment of a great sage. It was, rather, the belief that something had happened, an actual Event in historic time. Certainly, no one disagrees that the one great difference of Christianity is its claim—outrageous claim, many would say—that God actually entered historic time, first through his covenant with the Jews and then through the Incarnation.

  Certainly, there is nothing new about this. What concerns us here is the peculiar relevance of this belief for novel-writing. I could also speak of its relevance to other art forms—drama and poetry, for example—and to the genesis of science.

  But what kind of truth is a serious writer after when he sets out to give lasting pleasure?

  It is truth of a special sort.

  It is not the truth of a mathematical equation.

  It is not the truth of reporting in good journalism.

  Rather is it a deeper truth about the way things are, the way people are; in a word, a truth about the human condition; and a truth of such an order, both old and new, that one recognizes oneself in it. Therein lies the pleasure.

  But what has this to do with the reader’s pleasure, with the relationship between Christianity and the novel as an art form? Because it is no accident, as I have suggested, that the novel is almost exclusively a creature of Christendom.

  The fact that novels are narratives about events which happen to people in the course of time is given a unique weight in an ethos that is informed by the belief that awards an absolute importance to an Event which happened to a Person in historic time. In a very real way, one can say that the Incarnation not only brought salvation to mankind but gave birth to the novel.

  Judeo-Christianity is about pilgrims who have something wrong with them and are embarked on a search to find a way out. This is also what novels are about.

  In a word, it is my conviction that the incarnational and sacramental dimensions of Catholic Christianity are the greatest natural assets of a novelist.

  It is not too much to say, I think, that though most current novelists may not be believing Christians or Jews, they are still living in a Judeo-Christian ethos. If, in fact, they are living on the fat of the faith, so to speak, one can’t help but wonder what happens when the fat is consumed. Perhaps there are already signs. Witness the current loss of narrative of character and events in the post-modern novel.

  It is no accident that the novel has never flourished in the Eastern tradition. If Buddhism and Hinduism believe that the self is illusory, that ordinary life is misery, that ordinary things have no sacramental value, and that reality itself is concealed by the veil of maya, how can any importance be attached to or any pleasure be taken in novels about selves and happenings and things in an ordinary world?

  Or take Marxism: if the events of history are seen as a remorseless dialectic whose outcome is inevitable, who wants to read a novel about it? Try to think of one good Marxist novel.

  Or take behaviorism—which has had a tremendous influence on the scientific mind for the past fifty years. If all behavior is a psychological response to a stimulus, what happens to the freedom of choice which is the meat and bread of the novelist? Read any good behaviorist novels lately?

  Same for Freudianism: if our actions, emotions, our very thoughts arise from unconscious conflicts and forgotten childhood traumas, how does one write a novel about anything but a psychoanalyst and his patient on the couch talking about her dreams? Have you ever noticed how boring it is to listen to somebody else’s dreams, let alone read about them in novels?

  In a word, it is you Catholic educators who are in the best position both to understand the special bearing of our own tradition on this unique art form—the good novel about life and how we live it—and to turn on your young charges to reading—and yes, to the fun of it.

  That’s the message in the bottle.

  The Holiness of the Ordinary

  I SUPPOSE THERE ARE two ways of being both a Catholic and a writer. One is being a member of a society so thoroughly Catholic that it does not occur to one to write as a “Catholic.” It is hard to think of a great writer more Catholic than Dante or Chaucer and less self-consciously “Catholic.”

  The other is being a Catholic in a hostile or indifferent society. Then one can hardly escape thinking of oneself, however indirectly, as choosing to be Catholic as an alternative, defending the one and opposing the other. Alternative to what? Protestantism? Humanism? Marxism? New Age Buddhism?

  Yet, even now, one can think of a novelist like J. F. Powers who inserts his characters into such an exclusively Catholic milieu—priests in rectories, who have their troubles all right, but the troubles have little to do with the usual non-Catholic alternatives. It is difficult to imagine a depressed soul-searching humanist in a Powers novel.

  Like most putative Catholic writers these days, I belong to the second group. That is to say, there is hardly a moment in my writing when I am not aware of where, say, my main character—who is usually some kind of Catholic, bad, half-baked, lapsed, whatever—of where he or she stands vis-à-
vis the Catholic faith. It is a workable reference point. This doesn’t mean that I feel obliged to make the good guys Catholic. No, it is much more fun to put a rotten Catholic down in a life crisis and see how he handles it. Maybe badly or well, but what makes him tick can usually be understood in terms of some reference, negative or otherwise, to his Catholic background. It’s a tough birthright to shed. Love it or hate it maybe, but lukewarm seldom.

  Nor, God forbid, do I feel obliged to write edifying tales where virtue wins out and the Catholic faith triumphs over high-class “secular humanists” or low-class Mafia types. It usually works better to let the latter win or think he wins. Novelists are a devious lot, Catholic novelists more than most.

  While no serious novelist knows for sure where his writing comes from, I have the strongest feeling that, whatever else the benefits of the Catholic faith, it is of a particularly felicitous use to the novelist. Indeed, if one had to design a religion for novelists, I can think of no better. What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person, its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever else they do, confer the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world, bread, wine, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening—and what do you have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding.